“Celebrate the Submission”

The thing about training Jiu Jitsu is that you will get submitted over and over again in your quest to master the art! And a lot of people react to being submitted in various different ways from disappointment and frustration to anger. The thing is everyone taps on the mat! And if you are not tapping regularly either you are not training with good enough people or you are not experimenting and learning as much as you could.

At Jiu Jitsu Kingdom, whenever I see a student get frustrated, annoyed or upset about being submitted the first thing I tell them is that “on these mats, everyone taps”! Also that however many time they tap in training that they have tapped that time 1000! One of the interesting things I remember reading in Andre Galvao’s brilliant “Drill To Win” book was how “Terere” encouraged his students to celebrate the submission. What he meant was that when you tapped, firstly smile and acknowledge the other person’s technical proficiency and thank them for helping you learn more about Jiu Jitsu! No wonder “Terere” was such a Phenom and awesome coach with such brilliant attitude towards training and learning! Another thing they did at their academy was to exchange belts and train in various coloured belts just to help avoid the stigma of tapping to a lower belt which believe it or not actually happens a lot in all the top gyms around the world!

Again this is another area where people tend to judge too quickly when a higher belt taps to a lower belt. In Brazil for example this is common and not taken so seriously, perhaps they were working on a weaker area of their game or just got made a mistake and got caught. There may be a little laugh and joke about it but no one takes it too seriously and the higher belt is generally recognized as the more experienced player and there is no shame in it at all!

Anyway the take home lesson is next time you tap in training; smile, recognize and appreciate your opponent’s great technique, thank them for the lesson and learn from the experience. This will help increase your learning speed and longevity in the wonderful art of Jiu Jitsu!